Black Lives Matter in Classical Music
Kanneh-Mason Family Sets the Pace for Change
On April 18, 2020, British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason was due to perform Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall. When Covid-19 lockdowns forced the cancellation of the concert, she and her siblings decided to present a chamber version of the concert on Facebook Live from their family living room in Nottingham. For five months of lockdown, the Facebook page of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata´s brother, regularly featured widely praised concerts, including a tribute to George Floyd after he was killed in May.
Before 2020, the siblings had already won renown, including for Sheku's solo at the 2018 wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, televised to a global audience estimated at 1.9 billion. Their broadcasts from home further burnished their reputations for stunning musical talent and confident personal presence.
Kanneh-Mason siblings at kitchen table. Credit: Catholic Herald
Over this period, both American and British orchestras began to confront the demands for diversity and equity in all spheres of society. But, as Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason explained in her 2020 book House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons, the results which seem to come easy were built on years of hard work and dedication by both parents and children.
She explained the obstacles she and her husband faced in an interview last year:
I think every time we went into a concert, we were the only Black people in the audience. There were no black musicians on stage. It seemed to be true that in fact, this wasn't a space we belonged to. I was born in Sierra Leone to an African father, Sierra Leonean father and a Welsh mother. Already there was a huge barrier that had been overcome with my parents. I think that probably gave me the strength to think, "Do you know what? You don't listen to what other people say. You can go anywhere you want. You can go against people's expectations."
My husband was the son of immigrant Antiguan parents who had to overcome going to try and buy a house, and at the doorstep, the owners wouldn't let them over the doorstep and pretended the house was sold, and all those issues that they had to go through in the '50s and '60s. I think both of us were brought up with that sense of defiance, which was very helpful, I think.
[See more excerpts from the transcript at the end of this post.]
When Sheku was growing up, he said in an interview in 2021, he didn't know any Black classical musicians. Now he and his siblings are new role models. But becoming a classical musician, he added, still takes financial resources and educational opportunities. In addition to the dedication of their parents, the Kanneh-Masons had strong support from the Trinity Catholic School of Nottingham, a state-supported school. But, he added, budget cuts were already undermining the school.
If you haven't already heard and seen these musicians online, check out the following short clips.
For a wider selection, see this YouTube playlist of nine performances ranging from 2 minutes to 18 minutes in length.
For more background: Who are the Kanneh-Masons? (ClassicFM, February 21, 2023)
Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason explained more in a 15-minute interview in London on October 18, 2022. Full transcript available from Bloomberg Equality Summit.
Excerpts below:
Samuel Etienne: Our next guest is an award-winning author, speaker, advocate for music education, especially in state schools, and also happens to be the mother of some rather special children. Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason is a former lecturer in English at The University of Birmingham. Her memoir, House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons, in my hand here, won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Storytelling Award and Indie Book awards prize for nonfiction. She's a rather special mum, as you'll soon learn, and also, as a former academic, has some really interesting views on not only music education, but inclusivity and diversity in wider society. Welcome to the stage Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason.
...
Let's get straight into it. We're talking about overcoming barriers to entry. Now, your family, [has] overcome some massive barriers, not only in terms of race and being a black and mixed race family in perhaps very traditional and white institutions, but also the financial aspect of things. When you look at trying to navigate and enter new spaces, it can often be very costly, especially with regard to classical music. Could you perhaps just discuss how you overcame some financial barriers [to enable] all of your children to take up music to such a high level?
Kadiatu: I think that's probably why classical music is seen to be such an exclusive area because the instruments are expensive, the lessons are expensive, the travel to lessons are expensive. The travel to concerts and competitions, getting into concerts are expensive, the whole gamut. We have seven children, but of course, we started with one. She was desperate to have lessons. We thought, "Okay, that's fine."
Unfortunately, if you give something to one child, you've got to give to all seven. I think a good tip for parents is don't think about the whole thing at once. Just do it. Take one day at a time because if you do, you'll realize you can't afford it.
[laughter]
Samuel: That's looking at finances, but then if we look at the aspect of race, how you found navigating these very different spaces to the space in which you grew up.
Kadiatu: Thank you. I think when people talk about access to classical music as an example, the first thing to be mentioned is finance, which is a huge barrier, but it's not just finance. There's a huge cultural barrier as well. I know when the children were growing up and they were starting to play their instruments, we had so many people coming up to us and saying, why are you pushing, especially our boys into an area where they're only going to fail, into an area where they don't belong? We were accused of setting them up for failure.
...
Samuel: That's incredible, and with regards raising children, we've spoken at length about the logistics involved. I imagine you run your household like a military operation, and perhaps you could just give us some insight into what it took to get the children to practice, to concerts. You live in Nottingham, a lot of this is in London, what time would you have to leave in the morning, for example? What would you have to do to get them all to their various practices and recitals?
Kadiatu: Yes, so we made the very brave step of allowing them because Isata, our eldest, decided she wanted to study at the Junior Royal Academy of Music in London, which we thought, "Well, it's probably not going to happen because you have to have an audition. It's very difficult to get in," and then she got in.
Samuel: Very quickly, how old was she when she said that she wanted to do this?
Kadiatu: She was nine years old, and then we ended up at the height, taking five children every Saturday to the Royal Academy, and then the other two are going there now. It was a 6:00 AM train from Nottingham to London, and a whole day in London, and then back about half past eight at night, but just the logistics of getting all those children into the car, to the train station, to London.
I think, in some ways, we were lucky having seven children because you have to as parents have a sense of routine, otherwise you cannot survive bringing up that many children in a sane manner. The practice was part of that routine. They'd come home from school, they would eat, they would do their homework, they would practice, and because they saw all their brothers and sisters doing the same thing, I think that made it easier in a way.
...
Samuel: You've spoken at length and also written about inclusivity. Are there any sort of key takeaways, especially for our audience here, largely our corporate audience, that they can take away and apply tomorrow to try and be a bit more inclusive?
Kadiatu: I think this is actually a really difficult area, and it has so many different angles. If I could start with what a lot of orchestras are doing. When you audition for an orchestra, you go up in front of a panel, and you play. What they were finding was, however much they tried, they were not getting orchestras more diverse. [There is] a kind of unconscious bias, obviously, that goes on. They would see a Black person playing an instrument and immediately think, "Well, that person can't be as good as a White person playing an instrument."
What they introduced was blind auditions. Everybody went behind the screen and auditioned, and immediately, the numbers of Black and diverse people shot up.
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